The official launch was to come at Thursday's event for Tizen developers in Moscow, complete with market-ready products. But, in an echo of Samsung's most recent failure to launch a Tizen smartphone - in Japan earlier this year - the launch was canceled just days earlier.

Samsung provided no concrete date for the rollout of the commercial version of the phone at the developer summit but said in a statement Thursday that "the smartphone will appear on the Russian market later, when we can offer our users a fullest portfolio of applications".

While few people will care about this delay, there is onesmallgroup to whom this will be devastating news.

In all seriousness, nobody - not even Samsung itself - sees Tizen as a serious option or competitor to Android, and this news only serves to make that even clearer. Certain people keep trying to posit Tizen as some sort of huge threat to Android or as a sign that Samsung is seriously considering dumping Android (presumably thereby crippling Android and Google), but anyone with even the remotest bit of sense realises this makes about as much sense as a software patent.